Blaine was ready to go on his first day of Kindergarten on September 5th!

The whole family was ready to walk him the half block to school and drop him off for his first (half) day.  Daddy carried all the school supplies.  And Sarah.

The next day, 9/6, I took Sarah to the Westchester Children’s Museum to enjoy one of her last free mornings before her own school started.  She had a fantastic time, and keeps asking to go back to the museum “with the lighthouse”.

She spent so long in the toddler beach area that she worked up a sweat!

On Sunday, 9/10, we went to Sarah’s preschool for a welcome event in the garden.  There was music, and we got to meet some of Sarah’s new classmates and do a craft, and then we played on the playground.

On the walk home we decided to stop in to Tequila Sunrise for some lunch.

The next day, 9/11, was Sarah’s first day of Preschool (3s).

Her school did a very slow ramp-up, so we were only scheduled to be there for 20 minutes the first day, to see the room and meet the teachers.  The second and third days she went for an hour, with only half the class.  Then it increased to 1.5 hrs with the whole class, then 2 hrs.  Finally one week after she started she had a full morning of school.  Phew!  It was tough to keep track of the timing, but I guess it was nice to ease into things.  Often we’d end up spending extra time playing in the “garden room” pictured below.

Meanwhile, Blaine was adjusting well to his new Kindergarten schedule.  He seemed pretty tired out by the long days at first (8:40am-3pm) but he was doing pretty well after a few weeks.

He was thrilled when it was his turn to take home the class mascot, “Mama Echo”.  He got to have a sleepover with Mama Echo and wrote in a book about what he did with her (“Mama Echo rode on a fire truck and helped me put out a fire”).

At back to school night I took a pic of this schedule board which shows how the kindergartners spend their day.  It’s packed!